The Magic Keys Albert Murray (read novels website TXT) 📖

friend of Roland Beasley, the painter I had met in Paris before coming back to Alabama after the time I spent on the Côte d’Azur with Jewel Templeton.

I had come uptown that evening because Taft Edison was finally ready for me to listen to him read a few scenes and sequences from the manuscript of the novel I knew he had been working on for some time but that he had not yet discussed in terms of any overall narrative context. So I was looking forward to finding out what the basic story line was. My guess was that the scene of at least some of the action would be a college campus based on the one where I first saw him when I was a freshman and he was a junior. The only hint, however, was what he had said that first afternoon as we came along Fifth Avenue up to Forty-seventh Street, and I said what I said about his briefcase not being the trumpet case that he had in college.

When he called that morning and asked when I would have time to come by and listen to a few passages that he was thinking about selecting to fulfill requests for magazine publication, I got the impression that what he wanted first of all was my response to a narrator’s voice on a page, his angle of observation and context of recollection. Then he would want my immediate opinion of the literary quality and orientation that the verbal texture suggested.

But when he opened the door for me to step down into the vestibule of his studio apartment, the first objects I noticed on the wall before following him through the door on the right were two watercolor abstractions mounted on pale blue mats and matching, rimlike maple frames. And when I said they reminded me of the matted tear sheets of abstract paintings with which my roommate had lined the wall from the head to the foot of his bed by the end of the fall term, he said they were the work of a friend of his.

I also said it was my old roommate who told me about what books to check out of the library if I wanted to find out what modern art was about. And when I said, The first book I checked out was A Primer of Modern Art by Sheldon Cheney, Taft Edison said that it had to be the same copy he had checked out when he was a freshman because he worked in the library and there was only one copy of it in the collection.

That was when I said what I said about my roommate growing up going to exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago because Chicago was his hometown and also said that he was enrolled in the Department of Architecture, but he had a richer background in the humanities than all the students in the liberal arts courses that we took together. And Taft Edison said that the watercolor abstractions that I saw as I came in were the work of a friend of his who had gone to college to study mathematics but had become the painter whose work impressed him more than any other that he had seen by anybody else in Harlem.

Then when he said who the painter was I said what I said about meeting him in Paris and as I did I also realized that I had not called him since coming to New York and also that I had not told Royal Highness about how I had gone over and introduced myself to Roland Beasley at the Metropole in Paris that afternoon because I overheard him telling his companion about seeing the great Royal Highness onstage back during the heyday of the old Lafayette and Alhambra Theaters.

Old Rolly, Taft Edison said as we came on into the one-room plus bath plus stove and refrigerator nook apartment, and I saw the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and other paintings, watercolors, drawing, and silk-screen reproductions. The furniture included his convertible couch and a coffee table that could be unfolded to become a six-place dining table.

Look him up, man, Taft Edison said, giving me time to glance around. I’m sure he was right at home over there trying to come to personal terms with all of that heritage of articulate mankind. So you already know that he’s not just another one of these uptown provincials who have so few if any connections with the very things we went through what we went through to get up here to get next to. Look him up and go by and see some of his really ambitious pieces. I think he just might be the one to do for American painting what old Louie Armstrong and the Bossman are doing for American music.

And that was also what he went on to say what he said about how local or idiomatic variations sometimes become not only widespread but also nationwide, just as a local joke, saying, tall tale or legend may come to be regarded as everybody’s common property. And then he also said, Look, as far as I’m concerned, if it’s supposed to be American art and it doesn’t have enough of our idiomatic stuff, by which I mean mostly down-home idiom, in there it may be some kind of artistic exercise or enterprise but it ain’t really American.

I was ready for him to take my hat and trench coat then and when he hung them in the closet and came back saying what he said about what our old down-home stuff had done for church music not to mention pop tunes and ballroom music, I thought about Eric Threadcraft and the Marquis de Chaumienne but I did not mention them because I did not want to use too much of the time that he may have hoped that I would be able to spend listening and responding to what he had planned to read. Which is also why